Excerpts from The Measure of America: How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism by Claudia Roth Pierpont in The New Yorker, March 8, 2004.

". . .at Columbia, Boas had adapted his hopes for a museum-funded "vanishing tribes" project to the work of individual students - but the new generation had wider prospects in mind. Melville Herkovits was determined to study African culture despite prevailing wisdom that the subject didn't exist. . . Ruth Benedict set out to study Indian ethics. And Mead, at twenty-three, Boas assigned the youth-obsessed twenties' hot topic of adolescence…While Mead was interrogating Samoan girls about their sex lives, the newest member of Boas's brigade in New York, Zora Neale Hurston, was learning to measure heads. Hurston had enrolled at Barnard just after Mead left, in the fall of 1925, on a scholarship she won by dazzling a school trustee at a dinner for promising "New Negro" writers. Adept in the lyrical speech of her all-black Florida home town, and gifted with a cajoling wit, Hurston was strikingly qualified to make the "good collections of Negro folklore, and particularly of Negro song," that Boas had long wanted - not just the content but the nuances of style and meaning that only an insider could catch."

"In New York City, straight through the nineteen-fifties, schoolchildren packed off on trips to the American Museum of Natural History were shown displays of "human races by linear arrays running from apes to white," as Stephen Jay Gould - who was one of those children - recalled. But change was coming even to the House of Osborn, under curators like William K. Gregory, Margaret Mead, and, finally, Gould himself, who was seduced by the dinosaurs of Central Park West into becoming a paleontologist, and who, as Honorary Curator of Paleontology, demonstrated that punctilious Darwinian science was fully compatible with Boasian ethics."